Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

The NetBeans look-and-feel competition winners are...

Comments

• I have to admit Kirill, I'm looking for an excuse to develop some gui product of my own just to use Substance. :) Congrats on everyone Substance's success.

  Posted by: ilazarte on February 15, 2006 at 07:51 AM

• I tried the Substance modules on NetBeans 5.0. Though I like its features I do mind the bad performance. I have to wait for every click on GUI. So I finally switched it off again. :-(

  I'm using a P4 3.4 GHz HT processor. Though this is not top-notch, it's not bad either.

  I wonder if there could be something done about this, so Substance would be ready to be deployed for real killer apps like NetBeans.

  Regards,
  Christian

  Posted by: christian_schlichtherle on February 16, 2006 at 03:41 AM

• They used Substance because you provided a user-friendly NB plugin and because the competition explicitly listed a Substance tutorial as an example of what to use if they didn't know any other look and feel... :-)
  I feel sorry for some of the guys who used a different L&F and didn't make it to the top 30, since it wasn't a "Substance" competition in the first place, and I think initiative to investigate in other L&Fs should be rewarded, too... But the wallpapers and the button shapes were what stood out visually, and even if other L&Fs provided nice fonts and gradients and slick window shapes and what-not, the first look often was in favour of Substance only due to the never-before-seen wallpapers.
  And yes, I for example used the wallpaper feature while I worked with the NB betas... :-) Now in 5.0 I forgot to reactivate it -- by the way, I wonder, does Substance take much RAM to run?

  Posted by: ruthkusterer on February 16, 2006 at 04:11 AM

• Christian,

  Are we talking about 2.1 or 2.2 version? I have a 2.4GHz machine and haven't experienced problems that you describe. Do you see the netbeans java process taking 100%CPU? Do you see significant difference in heap footprint when you turn Substance on? During the development of 2.1 and 2.2 there were many improvements in the CPU and memory area - you may want to try the 2.2 release candidate again.

  Posted by: kirillcool on February 16, 2006 at 04:24 AM

• Kirill,

  I have tried both versions and unfortunately the performance issue pertains to both.

  The CPU ratio with Substance does increase notably (up to 30%), but not 100%. This is obvious as a single click on the GUI does not make the CPU busy long enough to let the Task Manager integration algorithm show a 100%.

  In more detail, whenever I click on a menu (popup or menu bar), it takes at least a second to show the menu, sometimes even 4-5 seconds.

  I did not see any difference in heap footprint. I use some custom garbage collection settings as proposed in the sample configuration. I will try to figure out whether this imposes the problem.

  Again, I like what you can do with Substance, but the performance keeps me from using it for real world apps. :-(

  Posted by: christian_schlichtherle on February 19, 2006 at 05:26 AM

• Christian,
  I would appreciate having your configuration parameters. I have never experienced such peformance issues on menu navigation, much less such significant CPU problems. I do have a few threads responsible for animation and other things, so perhaps your particular configuration poses some restrictions on them... You can mail me directly at kirillcool [at] yahoo.com. Thanks for investing your time and effort.

  Posted by: kirillcool on February 19, 2006 at 06:00 AM

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